ASG CRISIS

This ASG on CRISIS revolves around critical explorations of crisis. The ASG's work focuses on the alarming reports about crises such as hurricanes and floods; political instability and unpredictability; soaring civilian casualties due to armed conflict; scenes of desperate refugees and migrants; persisting poverty; and outbreaks of aggressive diseases. Such discourses, images and practices weave our world together and this trend is sustained by global media narratives reporting on crisis across the world. Yet, crises also refers to the pressing realities that those affected by experience, many of which cause societal rupture and destruction.

A crisis, materialised or perceived, provides for rapid shifts in the socio-political and economic landscapes of the world and brings to the surface the inherently gendered dimensions of any given crisis. Gender, masculinity, power and socioeconomic privileges are critical factors to take into account when studying crisis, not only to understand the ramifications of a crisis, but also to unfold definitions of a crisis and attempts of resolving it.

The new advanced study group asks a set of questions pertaining to critical explorations of crisis; what does crisis mean for the security, precariousness, rights, and social justice of particular individuals and groups in specific contexts? Urgent calls for political action and ethical calls for more inclusive and efficient models for crisis prevention, mitigation and restoration all indicate the importance of critically exploring crisis from an interdisciplinary perspective. Hence, the new group will undertake interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary examinations of the conceptualization of crisis, the reciprocity between various types of crises, and the gender dynamics by which a crisis is configured.

Here, four intimately intertwined areas are particularly central:

Climate Change

Conflict

Migration

Global Health

These transnational challenges are co-constitutive and as such impact upon one another. Moreover, they are embedded within multiple spatio-temporal processes. Most crises emerge out of an abrupt incident of emergency such as climate disaster or war but might move on to take shape of a state of permanency. As such crisis becomes a chronic condition which frames beliefs, hopes, and individual and collective agency as well as possible solutions to the crisis at hand.

The CRISIS ASG asks; how can we critically explore, understand, and cope with various kinds of societal crisis?